Do you sympathise with the strikers?

[TheDoveFromAboveCooCoo]

I'm afraid it's a no from me.

We are in West Yorkshire and we are just entering week 3 of a full bus drivers strike from one of the operators.

It's costing £75 a week in taxis to get my daughter to and from school. It's 6 miles away so too far to walk and I'm disabled and can't drive.

For my eldest daughter to visit her girlfriend it should be a 15 minute bus journey. Now it's a bus to Bradford Centre, then another one to Leeds, then another to her town.

My husband works in a minimum wage job and some of his colleagues who cannot drive are having to take unpaid leave as they can't afford taxis to get them to work and back.

I'm pretty frustrated and wish they would just bloody agree on something!!

Interested to hear other peoples thoughts and opinions especially with all these other potential strikes coming up.

I didn't actually know that the buses were already striking. I am in SW and we only hear about up and coming train strikes.

I support the right to stirke in principle, and I fully support the right to be in a union and would hate to get to the situation in US.

BUT the train drivers are living in cloud cuckoo land. This is not about gov not negotiating, this is about them already earning good wages, above average and wanting huge pay rises when no-one else in public sector is getting anything like.
I have no sympathy with their cause at all.

And the train strike will cost me, a family whose kids receive PP, £60 to get mine to school, and as one has exams, there is no way they can stay home.

Nice one unions, striking during kids exams, so they are more stressed/distressed about getting to and from school.

^BUT the train drivers are living in cloud cuckoo land. This is not about gov not negotiating, this is about them already earning good wages, above average and wanting huge pay rises when no-one else in public sector is getting anything like.
I have no sympathy with their cause at all^

BUT. This thread is about bus strikes. By bus drivers who earn about half what train drivers earn, despite needing a PCV licence to work.

So no surprise that a lot of drivers have switched to HGV driving, which is substantially better paid plus they don't have to deal with members of the public day in day out.

Plus I can imagine that it's quite hard to recruit new bus drivers these days and those they do have will be feeling the pinch financially, just like most people.

I agree with the right to strike; I do not agree with all strikes - particularly when they endanger lives.

It has been incredibly difficult in recent strikes (ie every weekend) to negotiate transport late at night, with a disability, due to the tube strikes in London which have been occurring on some lines since Christmas.

@TheDoveFromAboveCooCoo London have had tube strikes every weekend since Christmas on three lines. I think originally it was just two lines but now they've invited their buddy line to join them.

No.

BarbaraofSeville

as has been mentioned the OP asked about all the strikes coming up as well.
I have only commented on trains.
I can't comment on buses as we have seen nothing about it, the issues and their demands on TV here

Please realise the Train Drivers are NOT striking (yet) they belong to ASLEF but will obviously be affected by their colleagues who are. There is a strong possibility they will however refuse to take trains out due to safety concerns!

Just to clarify - yes my OP is about the Yorkshire bus strikes as that's the only one we have here at the moment and it seems to have been totally overlooked in the media despite the amount of disruption it's causing. Then we have train strikes starting tomorrow.

I am interested in hearing about peoples opinions and thoughts on all of the potential upcoming strikes whether it's trains, Royal Mail, NHS, etc.

Yes, I support them. If the big unions win decent rises then this has more chance of becoming the norm for others. Already inconvenienced by engineering works, cancellations and line disruption in the last few days … the latter two certainly could have been alleviated by having more staff available locally.

Company profits are not being held below the level of inflation, there is no justification for singling out workers (rather than the other elements of capitalism) to bear the brunt.

Not sure it's a last resort for the RMT. They seem to strike over everything, and often it's about ridiculous things like a Tube driver being suspended for having drugs in their system and then they're being "victimised". Funny how it's always about safety until it isn't.

I always tell people they should join a union, regardless of where they work. But there is a happy medium between fighting for your rights and to address the balance between shareholders and employees which always seems to be skewed in favour of shareholders, and making unrealistic demands (for example, when the RMT told SWR they had to guarantee that the guards' role would never change, even after they no longer had the franchise. No company can promise that a role will never change, especially in future when they may no longer run the show).

Yes I do sympathise with the strikers.

Well done for believing the government bullshit. They won't negotiate because they want the strikes to go ahead so they can feed off the division.

Not sure. GCSE students could do without the added complications.

Nope. Especially not with the likes of university lecturers who are essentially sticking the knife in to students who have had a really really shit run of the last 3 years (the entire duration of their degrees if they're people like me who started when we did). That cohort had prolonged strikes during their first year (I basically ended up cobbling together emergency crib sheets to cover the missing content we didn't get for my course because they refused to make up the lost content but were going to stick it on the exam regardless), then covid hit which wiped out second year and screwed up chunks of final year - and then strikes for their final year. There comes a time where reading the room and not losing the goodwill of those who would otherwise support you kicks in... same with the teaching unions if they vote to strike - after the amount of time our kids have lost in the last couple of years - they're really going to have mis-read public feeling on that one as well.

Public transport strikes, especially buses, are absolutely fucking the poorest sections of society in particular as well.

I didn’t even realise there was a bus strike. I don’t know enough about that one. I don’t support the train strikes. I think they are already very well paid and have brilliant conditions. I would support a strike by teachers as their low salaries are a disgrace

No. But then I’m a health care professional and look what happen when they closed dentists down for 12 weeks at the beginning of the pandemic. The knock on effects are still with us. However pretty much every NHS dentist over 55 is retiring as a result of the way things were managed and the never ending delay to changes needed within NHS dentistry. We have been waiting for over 10yrs for things to change, patiently seeing our incomes dropping in real terms.
The real impact is yet to come. Don’t expect to be able to see a dentist in the NHS in the near future. If not retiring, many are being forced to go private as the fee the patients pay is now more than the amount the NHS allocate so the difference has to be paid back to the NHS. Far simpler to charge the patients the same fee privately and keep the full amount.
I have often thought, seriously, about retraining as a train driver. I would be earning more money now and have significantly more benefits.

The whole economy needs to reshift. Some jobs probably can be done more effectively with technology (eg driverless trains). But there will then need to be other jobs in addition (more supervisor staff on trains to ensure that travellers are safe). Some jobs there is less of a need of; and people should be given lots of support to retrain

The cost of living crisis is hitting people really hard. But, if we can, we need to try and think about where we want to be as a country in 5 years time. We need more people to be able to gain better qualifications and particularly ensure that they supported by their employers and the government to do this. Staff get time off to train, no loss of pay, and government pays the training fees. Some people will then end up moving into other areas where there are shortages (such as IT).

We also need to look seriously at the lowest paid but high value jobs such as care; and make sure that staff here are paid fairly for intense work that they do

Prices are rising fast; but economists are right to be concerned about hyperinflation. If everyone gets a 10% payrise; what do you think will happen to the cost of fuel? There's a fixed amount of it that people can by, and as that demand increases so will the price. So we could all get a payrise of 10%, but won't really be any better off as the prices for the things we need to buy will also increase

So there’s a bus strike, too? Had no idea. We’ll, that’s just great. How do people get to work?

Yes, generally speaking. I think all workers should be paid a fair, living wage (that shouldn't need Topping up with state benefits) and to have a safe working environment. Some of the areas in West Yorkshire have been really dangerous for bus drivers lately.

However, I really wish they had taken a similar stance as (I think) Japan did. Where they continued to provide the service but refused any payment from customers. It then wouldn't have cost other low earners precious money for an alternative. I suspect though, our laws wouldn't allow for this tactic to be used (i.e. It would be seen as misconduct rather than striking)

we had no refuse collection for 2 months,
they now have a 27% pay increase

next week rail strikes, i will lose money and miss out on an event i had booked

so i am not sure if i feel sympathy.

it is easy to feel sympathy when you are not affected.

it feels like the 1970s.
we will be going back to a 3 day week and power cuts! <<not>>

i thought unions had lost power to strike?

Absolutely! The reality is that wages have been stagnant for the last decade or so....the Tories have cut things to the bone and there is no more meat left. so I expect a lot more strikes across different sectors. sadly the Tories don't care, they've syphoned off as much as they could and will just move onto other things. for people who comment that the UK is going the same way as the USA - indeed a lot of the companies in charge of things have come over from the states - health, teaching etc etc etc. On the macro level, I would prefer it if the government managed things more in terms of those who can afford it but since they wont, yes I support the strikers. I also think that the current regime needs to be voted out.

Not the case this is about the ticket staff, the train staff who helped during the pandemic too not had a pay rise in 3 years !

I didn't know about this, only the upcoming rail strikes. Someone said that train drivers are greedy, and I strongly disagree. The railway is one of the only industries that still has such a strong union culture, and that is why train driver wages are good compared to other skilled working class professions. They should be seen as a shining example of the power of unions, not greedy! Bus drivers should be earning at least equal to train drivers, particularly after how vulnerable they were over Covid, many losing their lives because of the shambles over PPE and delay in public mask use.

I am cross for you OP that this isn't more widely published. I read the Metro on the bus most days and didn't know about the strikes, I take my DC to different schools on the bus each day, so sympathise as I will struggle if there is a bus strike for that long here. Though ultimately I do agree with strikes, they help create fairer wages for all.